Conservative Catholic Bishops Rebuked By Catholic Health Workers

In a harsh rebuke of the increasingly extreme United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a major Catholic health group backed the Senate’s health-care compromise on abortion. The Catholic Health Association said that the most important thing that Congress could do was pass a bill that would cover the nation’s uninsured.

I suppose the Bishops believe that leaving people uninsured to die in the cold in order to use health reform as a platform for abortion politics is the moral and ethical route.

The current crop of conservative Bishops appear hardhearted and clueless to the concerns of real people who desperately need help. They seem to believe that priestly polemics will solve the health care problem in this country.

“The Catholic Health Association does not represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life,” the conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson said in a statement, calling the association’ move “utterly offensive.”

The difference between The Catholic Health Association and ideologues like Hudson, is that the hospitals actually deal with uninsured sick people. Well, Hudson and his ilk also deal with sick people – but in their case, a good shrink and medication is all that is needed.

Good for the Catholic Health Association for standing up to the extremists in the Catholic Church and the Republican Party.

In other Catholic News:

The Associated Press reports that two more Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland have resigned in the wake of a damning investigation into decades of church cover-up of child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.

The bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field, offered an apology to child-abuse victims as they announced their resignations during Christmas Mass on Friday. Priests read the statement to worshipers throughout the archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland’ 4 million Catholics.

In his Christmas sermon, Archbishop Martin said the church for too long had placed its self-interest above the rights of its parishioners, particularly innocent children. “It has been a painful year,” he told worshipers. “But the church today may well be a better and safer place than was the church of 25 years ago ‚Äî when all looked well, but where deep shadows were kept buried.”

Of course, we know this is nonsense. Until the Catholic Church does the following, there will be abuse:

1) Allow openly gay, sexually active priests. Doing so will attract psycho-sexually healthy gay men who will not use the priesthood to hide their sexuality – and in many cases use their power to take advantage of the young and vulnerable. Out gay priests will look for age-appropriate partners.

2) Allow women into the priesthood. This would immediately break up the good old closet boys network.

3) Allow married heterosexual priests. Just as it is imperative to attract sexually mature gay people, it is just as key to attract sexually healthy heterosexuals. Having a team of immature, pent-up priests is a recipe for disaster.

About the Author

Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

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2 Comments

WilliamDecember 26, 2009 at 6:02 pm -

Wayne, I particularly like your third point about attracting “psycho-sexually healthy gay men who will not use the priesthood to hide their sexuality.”

Quite some time ago I wrote to the editor of “Christian Order”, a British right-wing Roman Catholic periodical, who had written a long, tiresome rant about “homosexuals” in general and about “pervert priests” in particular. I pointed out that the unenlightened teaching of the RC Church on homosexuality, coupled with the rule of mandatory celibacy for priests, actually attracted gay Catholic men who took that teaching seriously and who, though they had no priestly vocation, had convinced themselves that they did have one as a means of copping out of being gay and burying the issue.

I also pointed out that, if you want to “play around” with under-age adolescents, you certainly don’t need to be a RC priest in order to do it, and I challenged him to consider seriously what it was, therefore, that attracted such men to the priesthood.

I never received any reply or acknowledgement, of course.

MerlynDecember 29, 2009 at 7:40 am -

I’m glad to see someone challenge this lot. And you are dead right–the US Conference of Catholic Bishops IS becoming increasingly extremist, mostly because of Bennie XVI.

Of course these jerks are insensitive and inflexible on the subject of abortion. Hell, they won’t even allow for birth control! They are so far removed from the lives and struggles of the laity that it isn’t even funny. Women seem to exist solely to provide more little Catholics for the hierarchy to screw up. I notice that the hierarchy LOVES to teach the laity but they are so proud and arrogant that they don’t believe that the laity could teach them a few things.

As for this witchhunt against gay priests and lesbian nuns, it is disgusting. Many priests and nuns entered religious life because they were really allowed no healthy life in the outside world. Many of them I believe were “guilted” into religious life. But a fair portion of priests and nuns believe in the religious life and should be left the hell alone! If they allowed for a married priesthood (both gay and straight) you would see far less of the pedophilia that has made the RCC so infamous in recent years. Most people do not do well being celibate and it certainly shouldn’t be forced nor should it be a reason for forbidding someone to serve God (as they believe being a priest does). It would also be good to have women priests. In addition to helping decrease paedophilia,it would also provide a clergy which is living a life similar to that of the laity and would bring more understanding of the real problems faced by laypeople.

I was Catholic for several years in my 20s and would never return to the RCC. Their homophobia and hatred of women are simply dispicable. Thank the Goddess for the Old Catholic Church and for Paganism. I practice both and will never let some woman-hating, homophobic bishop or priest tell me how to live my life ever again.

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